The Art of the Renaissance in Northern Europe: Its Relation to the Contemporary Spiritual and Intellectual Movements

V
The Pictorial Unity of Late Gothic
and Renaissance
The Masters of the Netherlands

IT IS one of the peculiarities of the German nation that it is
always inclined to break off a course of development and
enter a new one, throwing overboard the highest achievements previously gained. Hence the sudden changes, the irrational
leaps, the catastrophic turns which we find so often in German
history. This is also reflected in the fine arts. We remember what
the mature Dürer thought of the works which impressed him in
his youth.

The flow of development is much steadier in the Western countries, especially in the Netherlands. Because of their extensive
international relations, the Netherlands took up the new discoveries and new trends more speedily than any other country of
Northern Europe. Nevertheless, Dutch and Flemish painting of
the Renaissance descends in a broad and uninterrupted stream
from Old Netherlandish painting of the dying Middle Ages. Pictorial culture reached a height in the Netherlands during the fifteenth century which it had attained nowhere else. A stronger
sense of tradition seems to have kept the Dutch and Flemish artists
from breaking with the past as radically as the Germans did. I
wish to illustrate this with a few examples.1

The leading German painter-engraver in the second half of the fifteenth century was Martin Schongauer, whose works impressed
the young Dürer so strongly that he desired to become his pupil. Schongauer best authenticated panel painting, The Madonna in
the Rose Arbor of 1473 in Colmar, is the perfect embodiment of
the Late Gothic idea of the Virgin. In spite of a balanced composition and emphasis on main accents, it is filled with the restless
movement characteristic of the mode of the time. Draperies and

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